Ship crews have pulled more than 2,000 refugees from overcrowded boats in the Mediterranean, Italy’s coastguard has said, as people-smugglers stepped up operations during two consecutive days of good weather.

More than 7,100 people have now been rescued from international waters since Thursday, many of them on the dangerous journey from Libya.

Europe’s worst immigration crisis since the second world war is in its third year, and there has been little sign of any let-up in the flow of people coming from North African to Italy.

Ships belonging to Doctors without Borders, Migrant Offshore Aid Station, Italy’s navy, the EU’s border agency Frontex and the bloc’s anti-people-smuggling mission Sophia all helped take the migrants off nine boats on Friday.

About 60,000 boat refugees have been brought to Italy so far this year, according to the interior ministry.

The refugee problem involving illegal immigration from North Africa, mainly Morocco was huge before the Libyan war. After it became a flood. After Syria it became a tsunami. There is no way to minimize the US role in contributing to this crisis.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday backed away from his claim that rabbis had called to poison Palestinian water, saying he hadn’t intended to offend Jews, after Israel and Jewish groups said his statements were promoting blood libels and anti-Semitic tropes.

“After it has become evident that the alleged statements by a rabbi on poisoning Palestinian wells, which were reported by various media outlets, are baseless, President Mahmoud Abbas has affirmed that he didn’t intend to do harm to Judaism or to offend Jewish people around the world,” his office said in a statement.

In his speech to the Parliament of the European Union in Brussels on Thursday, Abbas claimed accusations of incitement by the Palestinians were unfair as “The Israelis are doing this as well… Certain rabbis in Israel have said very clearly to their government that our water should be poisoned in order to have Palestinians killed.”

JERUSALEM — After more than a week of local and international condemnation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel issued a statement on Friday retracting his accusation that it was a Palestinian cleric who gave Hitler the idea of annihilating Europe’s Jews during World War II.

Mr. Netanyahu, criticized even by Israeli historians for distorting facts, had already said he never intended to absolve Hitler of responsibility for the Holocaust by blaming the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, but the new statement went further...

Israeli settlers, on Saturday, opened pepper spray on 11-year-old Qamar Qafisha, from Hebron, on Shuhada street in the city.PNN reports that settlers from Bet Hadasa and Ramat Yishai settlements, illegally built on Palestinian lands in the Hebron district, opened OC poisonous spray in the girl’s face while she was standing in front of her house in Hebron.Qamar suffered intense asphyxiation, and was treated on the spot by residents.

Violations on Palestinian children by Israeli settlers are not uncommon in the region, taking place in the form of multiple hit and run attacks with moving vehicles, kidnapping attempts, torture and even burning, as in last summer’s case of 17-year-old Muhammad Abu Khdeir...

this is the typical reporting in the press that shows balance and truthfulness

The powerful, apartheid, terrorist, rogue nuclear state of Israel is panicked by the completely peaceful, quickly growing Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks through non-violent means to end the Israelis’ genocide of the Palestinian people and obtain independence for Palestine.

The Zionists equate BDS with “terrorism,” employing the identical methods against it as they direct against their perceived archenemy, Iran—from false propaganda to sanctions, and now apparently cyber-warfare and incitement of violence. Meanwhile, the Zionist Occupation Government in the Holy Land has readied its next violent assault in its campaign to exterminate the Palestinian people.

Deuce, I appreciate the second video you put up. It states things everyone should know by now but there is value in being reminded of this stuff periodically.

The point about how GDP is inflated by actions that really don't add anything to the economy is an important one. It shows that even the current low and stagnant growth numbers don't truly reflect how bad things are.

The video also points out areas that only support the short term objectives of the elites or are actually counter-productive, such as stock buy backs or the vast amounts we waste on the military. What it doesn't point is the opportunity costs lost both in terms of money that could be used on more productive uses or the loss of people capital. In the US since the early '90s, all of our best and brightest have been opting out of engineering and the hard sciences in favor of the financial fields and the money that can be made on Wall Street.

The British, at least half of them plus one, were fed up with the myriad rules coming out of Brussels that dictated every aspect of daily life, for instance, the fact that Italian restaurants can no longer put those small flasks of olive oil out on the table for their customers anymore but now have to use the actual full original bottles that are properly labelled and have approved tamper proof caps.

They are tired of being forced to accept anyone from Europe that wants to come to the UK for a new job or anything else.

As noted in the 2nd video above, they are tired of treaties negotiated by the elites like TTIP for instance that takes decision making out of the hands of the elected national government and turns it over to a council of corporate lawyers.

Anybody with enough sense to find the polling place should be smart enough to understand that you can only push people so far before there is going to be push back despite any negative consequences that might ensue.

England has one of the most important assets on the planet, the English language. People sell to England because the English want what they have and have the money to pay for it. They buy for the same reasons. Who gives a crap about what passport someone is carrying as long as they have a visa. I would rather be setting up a business in England than in Belgium, France or Italy.

The Scandinavians will trade with England as well as Spain, Australia, US, Canada, China, all of the Americas and Japan.

I would rather travel to a country that has border control than one that does not. So would most others.

England has a competent military, a tremendous, civil service and they have been trading as long as the Roman conquest.

I’m not worried about England. If the Irish and the Scots want to go it alone, who cares?

Not everyone who voted for Brexit is a violent, racist, xenophobe. A sizable number wanted the UK out because of the anti-democratic and pro-corporatist way the European Commission governs. This is a point that cannot be emphasized enough.

The economic lesson emerging from the Brexit vote is consistent with what those who favored the Leave campaign long suspected: continental Europe needed the U.K. far more than the U.K. needed Europe.

The globalist dominoes will ideally begin to fall after Brexit as other leading nations realize they have unwisely hitched their economic wagons to parasites for the past several decades (see, e.g., the U.S.-Mexico relationship in NAFTA).

The Brexit hysterifiers almost uniformly predicted that it would be a Black Friday indeed for the U.K. if they voted to leave, and the other members of the EU promised to punish Britain if it chose a divorce.

Looks as though it was Britain that had the last laugh on the day after Brexit. It wasn't the British markets that took the real hit. That was borne by the continental Europeans:

- The FTSE 100 finished down 3.1%

- Germany's Dax dropped 6.8%

- France's Cac closed 8.0% lower

- Spain's Ibex ended down 12.4%

- Italy's FTSE MIB fell 12.5%

- In Greece, the Athens market lost 13.4%

At The Spectator, Matthew Lynn summed up the sentiment:

Share prices in freefall. Pension funds obliterated. A sea of red ink across trading screens. Billions wiped off the value of leading companies. And brokers, or at least the automated trading algorithms that have replaced them, contemplating throwing themselves out of the window, or whatever exactly it is that an algorithm does when it has a really bad day at the office. That is surely an accurate description of the City of London this morning.

Except, er, it isn't really ...

It is Madrid, Milan, Paris, and Frankfurt that are tanking. The reason? While there will be a short-term hit to the British economy, it will be the rest of Europe that suffers far more from this than us -- and investors have already figured that out.

The predictions were that the London market would go into meltdown if we voted to leave the EU. It would be Lehman Brothers all over again, except probably far worse. The index could lose 20 per cent or 30 per cent of its value we were told ... But it's only fallen back to its level of, er, last Friday. In effect, a week of gains have been lost. It is still up on the beginning of February. You need a very fevered imagination to describe that as a catastrophe.

In short, the losses across Europe are far worse than ours. That is, to say the least, a bit odd. After all, Brexit is meant to be an economic catastrophe for us, not for our neighbours, who have all been wise enough to stay in the EU, and will carry on enjoying all its wonderful economic benefits.

So what's up? The explanation is simple. In reality, the EU doesn't make much difference to the UK economy one way or another ...

Our trauma will be over quite quickly but the EU's has just begun. The markets have worked that out -- and investors are quite rightly getting out while they still can.

Now that Brexit has shown that disentanglement is possible without disaster, this paves the way for a long list of other supranational arrangements to be successfully unwound. First the EU, then comes the U.N. itself.

Take joy in the win, but do not believe that it is the final win. David Cameron has announced his resignation . . . in 4 months. And says that he will not invoke article 50 of the EU charter to start the withdrawal process, but leave it to his successor. No moves towards liberty can be made until that invocation, so this is neither more nor less than an attempt to give time to reverse the vote of the people and reimpose the chains of Brussels.

At the same time, there is now a petition in Britain to overturn the Referendum claiming that a 4% vote margin is not enough to change policy. From before the vote, the EU satraps in all parties in Parliament except the UKIP declared that the vote would not be considered binding and that they would refuse to leave the EU. That is what they are doing as we write.

There have been similar moments in British history. The only time such things have not been settled in blood was in 1688, and that involved Parliament siding against an absolute monarch. This time, Parliament is siding against the British people.

Britain will either end up enslaved or free and totally changed. Scotland wants to be subject to someone who they hope will pay their bills. They went massively pro-EU, so I suspect that there will be another Scottish independence vote soon. And this time the mood south of Hadrian's Wall will be "good riddance". What I would like to see would be the Shetlands and the Orkneys given the option of staying with Britain.

Northern Ireland is something that the Brits really would like to give back to Ireland. The reason they haven't is a matter of the Scottish descended Protestants. If they want to stay in the EU [and Northern Ireland voted to] and Britain wants to leave, the obvious thing would be for the 6 Counties to revert to EU member Ireland. Britain will be smaller, but more internally consistent and freer.

But when dealing with distant tyrants, there will be a veil of blood to be passed through. Something we might keep in mind.

Subotai Bahadur===Joan • an hour agoThe Stab in the Back commences: MPs (Torys) will not include MEP Farage (UKIP) in Brexit negotiations and back peddle on immigration.===Carswell and Hannan Freeze Out Farage, Say They WON’T Lower Immigration

The original Magna Carta was a charter agreed upon by King John of England in 1215. Its 801st anniversary just passed. So no, I wasn't there. But that charter has become part of an important, iconic and political myth that the deal between an unpopular king and rebellious barons marked the beginning of individual English freedoms, personal liberties and due-process protection of individuals under the law. The Magna Carta has also been cited as providing the essential foundation for the contemporary powers of Parliament and legal principles such as habeas corpus.

That's the mythology, and it's important.

While I understand that describing the Brexit victory as Magna Carta 2.0 is inexact, I think it makes a key point: Britain will regain its political freedom, its autonomous self-government and its independence from an EU that is spinning out of control under the power of establishment elites, unelected and unaccountable socialist bureaucrats, and a judicial court that is increasingly making legal decisions that replace Britain's powerful common law.

The EU's tax and regulatory policies, climate-change and welfare spending and free immigration -- even in wartime -- are gradually ruining Europe. That's why I believe Brexit is good for British freedom, political autonomy and the survival of democratic capitalism....

The European Commission chief says it “doesn’t make any sense” to stall the process.

LONDON (Reuters) — Britain was under pressure on Saturday to set out a quick timetable for a divorce from the European Union after the country’s historic vote to leave the bloc sent shockwaves around the world.

Global stock markets plunged on Friday, and sterling saw its biggest one day drop in history after Britons voted by 52-48 percent to exit the EU, which it joined more than 40 years ago.

Ratings agency Moody’s downgraded its outlook for Britain, saying its creditworthiness was now at greater risk as the country would face substantial challenges to successfully negotiating its exit from the bloc.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said he wanted to begin negotiating Britain‘s departure immediately.

“Britons decided yesterday that they want to leave the European Union, so it doesn’t make any sense to wait until October to try to negotiate the terms of their departure,” Juncker told Germany’s ARD television station.

Prime Minister David Cameron announced on Friday he would resign after leading the failed campaign to stay in the bloc, and said someone else should take the lead in negotiating the unprecedented and complicated extrication.

He suggested his replacement would be in place by October. That person could be his Conservative Party rival Boris Johnson, the former London mayor who became the most recognizable face of the Leave camp and who is now favorite to succeed him.

Britain‘s decision to leave the EU is the biggest blow since World War Two to the European project of forging greater unity.

The United Kingdom itself could also now break apart, with the nationalist leader of Scotland, where nearly two-thirds of voters wanted to stay in the EU, saying a new referendum on independence from the rest of Britain was “highly likely”.

Scottish government ministers were meeting on Saturday to decide their next move.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will meet French, German and Italian leaders in Berlin on Monday to discuss future steps, and the foreign ministers of Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, will meet on Saturday morning.

U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday tried to limit the fallout from Britain‘s vote to leave the European Union which threatens to harm the U.S. economic recovery and distract U.S. allies from global security issues.

Obama vowed that Washington would still maintain both its “special relationship” with London and close ties to Brussels, but stood by his warning that Britain would move to the back of the queue when it came to trade deals.

U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump, whose own rise has been fueled by similar anger at the political establishment, called the vote a “great thing”.

Supporters of Islamic State and al Qaeda said Britain had divided and weakened itself, according to the SITE monitoring service. Militant Islamists took to the internet to applaud the British vote, with one saying it marked the “beginning of the disintegration of the Crusaders”.

The British pound fell as much as 10 percent against the U.S. dollar on Friday to levels last seen in 1985 on fears the decision could hit investment in the world’s fifth-largest economy, threaten London’s role as a global financial capital, and usher in months of political uncertainty. The euro slid 2.0 percent against the U.S. dollar.

World stocks saw more than $2 trillion wiped off their value. European stocks ended down 7.0 percent, the biggest one day fall since 2008. U.S. stocks fell suffered the largest selloff in ten months sharply, with the Dow Jones industrial average losing 3.4 percent. [.N]

Investors put their cash in the safety of gold, which clocked up its biggest daily gain since the global financial crisis of 2008, ending Friday up 5.0 percent at $1,315 an ounce.

Ratings agency Moody’s said Britain was at risk of a credit downgrade, assigning a negative outlook to its ‘Aa1’ rating for British government debt.

“During the several years in which the UK will have to renegotiate its trade relations with the EU, Moody’s expects heightened uncertainty, diminished confidence and lower spending and investment to result in weaker growth,” the agency said.

Quitting the world’s biggest trading bloc could cost Britain access to the trade barrier-free single market and means it must seek new trade accords with countries around the world. A poll of economists by Reuters predicted Britain was likelier than not to fall into recession within a year.

The EU arose out of the ashes of two world wars to unite a continent and now faces the challenge of maintaining economic and political unity without Britain, which has the EU‘s biggest financial center, a U.N. Security Council veto, a powerful army and nuclear weapons.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel called the “Brexit“ vote a watershed for European unification.

The result emboldened eurosceptics in other EU member states, with French National Front leader Marine Le Pen and Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders demanding their countries also hold referendums. Le Pen changed her Twitter profile picture to a Union Jack and declared “Victory for freedom!”

The British vote will trigger at least two years of divorce proceedings with the EU, the first . . . . . . .

Longtime conservative columnist George Will is wiping his hands clean of the Republican Party.

“This is not my party,” Will told PJ Media on Saturday. The Washington Post writer said a Democratic presidency would be better than the alternative offered by Donald Trump — who once called Will a “major loser,” according to . . . . .

The Dilbert Blog: Hypnosis dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/hypnosis.htmlJul 7, 2007 - When I was in my early twenties, I enrolled in the Pierre Clement School of Hypnosis in San Francisco. I thought I could earn some extra money

OK, here it goes: if you want to advance your career in 2016, start reading this blog.

You have probably seen or are familiar with the Dilbert comic strip. But you may not know as much about the man behind Dilbert, Scott Adams, who is also the author of, you guessed it, the Dilbert Blog. Dilbert Blog is updated daily with all sorts of interesting ideas on cows, robots, climate change, you name it.

Oh, and since August, Dilbert Blog has been predicting the rise of Donald Trump with uncanny accuracy. Scott Adams says that Trump will win the general election in a landslide.

Why?

Because Trump is what Adams refers to as a Master Persuader, someone whose skill set in language, hypnosis (yes, Trump is a hypnotist), and persuasion is so strong that they can get people to do what they want in the board room and on the election trail. Adams, who is a trained hypnotist himself, says that if you view the world as two dimensional, Trump might look like a loud, dumb lucky racist, but if you put on Master Persuader goggles, all of his moves appear methodical and calculated. And before you dismiss Adams as a closet Trump-supporting-Republican-apologist, keep in mind that he also believes that Kanye West is a Master Persuader who could win a presidential election. Also, Adams has been reminding his readers (and he has LOADS of readers) that:

"I don’t endorse Trump or anyone else. I’m not smart enough to know who would do the best job of president. Nor am I well-informed on the big issues. My interest is in Trump’s persuasion skills. I have never seen better".

He says this a lot.

And it is precisely those “Trump persuasion skills” that are going to make your life better. I would tell anyone to read Dilbert Blog, especially lawyers, for whom persuasion is more than a little important. By reading Dilbert Blog, you’re going to become more persuasive in the court room and/or the board room – these new found skills will even bleed over into your personal relationships. Because, whether or not you love or hate Trump, Dilbert Blog will show you how Trump operates, and, more importantly, how you can use Trump’s persuasion skills in your daily life.

Persuasion is a skill that can be learned, and now I’m speaking from personal experience. Since beginning to read Dilbert Blog and observing Trump through Master Persuader goggles, everything in my life has been getting better, particularly my company. We’re doing less work and making more money. Since Dilbert Blog, we got deals done with a bunch of big publishers and our revenue has been growing exponentially. I honestly don’t know how we got anything done before I knew about Dilbert Blog and Master Persuaders.

The Humiliation of the American Male in 2016Posted June 23rd, 2016 @ 11:24am in #Trump #clinton2016 #sexism

Perhaps the biggest unreported story of this presidential election is the humiliation of the American male. Unless I’m blinded by confirmation bias – which is entirely possible – it seems to me that the humiliation of American men is now institutionalized in the media.

Check out this commercial for dishwasher detergent. And take careful note of the American man’s v-neck sweater. That’s the uniform of a man who is owned by a woman.

The Obama-appointed U.S. attorney for Idaho has taken the highly unusual step of intervening in a local criminal case involving an alleged sexual assault by juvenile Muslim migrants and threatened the community and media with federal prosecution if they “spread false information or inflammatory statements about the perpetrators.”

The two older boys from Sudan were arrested on June 17 and released from juvenile detention less than a week later on June 23 pending further court proceedings.

Read WND’s previous stories on the Idaho case here and here.

The following is a news release issued late Friday from the office of United States Attorney Wendy J. Olson.

“BOISE – The United States Attorney’s Office extends its support to the five-year-old victim of assault, and her family, at the Fawnbrook Apartments in Twin Falls.

“The United States Attorney’s Office further encourages community members in Twin Falls and throughout Idaho to remain calm and supportive, to pay close attention to the facts that have been released by law enforcement and the prosecuting attorney, and to avoid spreading false rumors and inaccuracies.

“Grant Loebs is an experienced prosecutor, and Chief Craig Kingsbury is an experienced law enforcement officer. They are moving fairly and thoughtfully in this case,” said Wendy J. Olson, U.S. Attorney for Idaho. “As Mr. Loebs and Chief Kingsbury informed the public, the subjects in this case are juveniles, ages 14, 10 and 7. The criminal justice system, whether at the state or federal level, requires that juveniles be afforded a specific process with significant restrictions on the information that can be released. The fact that the subjects are juveniles in no way lessens the harm to or impact on the victim and her family.”

Olson continued with what amounts to a threat of prosecution:

“The spread of false information or inflammatory or threatening statements about the perpetrators or the crime itself reduces public safety and may violate federal law. We have seen time and again that the spread of falsehoods about refugees divides our communities. I urge all citizens and residents to allow Mr. Loebs and Chief Kingsbury and their teams to do their jobs.”

As one of 93 U.S. attorneys, Olson represents the federal government in all civil and criminal cases within her state.

Olson was appointed to her post in 2010 by President Obama and has a history of taking strong stands against “anti-Muslim bias.”

Ann Corcoran, the author of the Refugee Resettlement Watch blog and the book “Refugee Resettlement and the Hijra to America

image: http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=worldnetdaily-20&l=am2&o=1&a=1508820708,” said Olson’s statement is reminiscent of Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s warning the day after the San Bernardino jihad massacre in which Lynch said she would take “aggressive action” to prosecute “anti-Muslim” rhetoric that “edges toward violence.” Lynch was forced to walk back those comments after outrage from free speech advocates.

“This is threatening free speech,” Corcoran said of Olson’s statement. “It’s the federal government trying to intimidate into silence those citizens who don’t have resources or connections. This must mean we have hit a nerve with this administration.”....

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/06/explosive-new-twist-in-idaho-sex-assault-case/#B4d0u7MZJ7JCVoHd.99

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/05/25/white-high-school-football-players-in-idaho-charged-with-raping-black-disabled-teammate-with-a-coat-hanger/?wpisrc=nl_most-draw5&wpmm=1White high school football players in Idaho charged with sexually assaulting black, disabled teammate with a coat hanger</a>

<i>Three white high school football players at Dietrich High School in Idaho have been charged in the October 2015 assault of their black disabled teammate. The victim's family filed a $10 million lawsuit against the school. Here's what you need to know.

(Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)

<b>When a teammate held out his arms after football practice in their high school locker room, the student thought he was about to get a hug.

Instead, he was viciously assaulted, authorities say.

As the teammate restrained the victim, another football player allegedly thrust a coat hanger into the victim’s rectum, according to a criminal complaint. Then a third teammate kicked the coat hanger several times.</b>

The Oct. 23, 2015, incident has rocked the tiny town of Dietrich, Idaho. This spring, after several months of investigation, the state attorney general’s office filed sexual assault charges against the three. Two of the teenagers are being charged as adults and could face life in prison, under Idaho law.

<i>Earlier this month, the victim’s family filed a $10 million lawsuit against Dietrich High School. According to the lawsuit, the attack wasn’t a one-off, but rather the culmination of months of racist abuse by white students against the victim, who is black.

The victim “was taunted and called racist names by other members of the team which names included ‘Kool-Aid’ ‘chicken eater’ ‘watermelon’ and [the N-word],” the suit alleges.</i>

The civil complaint filed in the U.S. District Court in Idaho also claims that one of the students charged with sexual assault displayed a Confederate flag and demanded the victim recite a racist song titled “Notorious KKK.”

I understand where your comment, which is the dumbest you've done since saying Israel had annexed Gaza and occupied it with IDF troops, comes from....it doubtlessly comes from your 'flee and hide instinct' that has been so well developed in yourself after your long life time of petty larceny.

Between 2008 and 2014, 40% of all murder convictions in Florida were criminal aliens. In New York it was 34% and Arizona 17.8%.

During those years, criminal aliens accounted for 38% of all murder convictions in the five states of California, Texas, Arizona, Florida and New York, while illegal aliens constitute only 5.6% of the total population in those states.

That 38% represents 7,085 murders out of the total of 18,643.

That 5.6% figure for the average illegal alien population in those five states comes from US Census estimates.

Adams is a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences and a former member of Mensa.[11]

In recent years, Adams has had two notable health problems. Since late 2004, he has suffered from a reemergence of his focal dystonia which has affected his ability to draw for lengthy periods on paper,[12] though it causes no real problem now that he draws the comic on a graphics tablet. He also suffered from spasmodic dysphonia, a condition that causes the vocal cords to behave in an abnormal manner. He recovered from this condition temporarily but in July 2008 underwent surgery to rewire the nerve connections to his vocal cord.[13] The operation was successful, and Adams's voice is now completely functional.[14]

Adams is a vegetarian and trained as a hypnotist.[15] He credits his own success to affirmations, including Dilbert's success and achieving a ninety-fourth percentile on a difficult qualification exam for business school, among other unlikely events. He states that the affirmations give him focus.[16] He has described a method which he has used that he says gave him success. He pictured in his mind what he wanted, and wrote it down 15 times a day on a piece of paper.[17]

Stephan Pastis, creator of Pearls Before Swine, credits Adams for launching his career as a cartoonist.

Adams married Shelly Miles in 2006. She has two children named Savannah and Justin Miles, but in a February 2014 blog posting he revealed that he is no longer married.[18]

He currently resides in Pleasanton, California.

Adams has often commented on political matters. Despite this, in 2016 he wrote on his blog "I don’t vote and I am not a member of a political party."[19] In 2007, he suggested that Michael Bloomberg would make a good presidential candidate.[20] Before the 2008 presidential election he said, "On social issues, I lean Libertarian, minus the crazy stuff",[21] but said in December 2011 that, if he were president, he would do whatever Bill Clinton advised him to do because that "would lead to policies that are a sensible middle ground".[22] On October 17, 2012, he wrote "while I don't agree with Romney's positions on most topics, I'm endorsing him for president".[23]

In 2015, he stated that he would not endorse a candidate for the 2016 elections, but he has been offering praise for Donald Trump's persuasion skills, especially on his blog. Adams has predicted that Trump will win both the Republican nomination and the general election in a huge landslide.[24] After Trump lost to Senator Ted Cruz in the Iowa caucus, rather than achieving a landslide victory as Adams had forecasted, Adams said that he suspected election fraud was committed and suggested that the caucus results were fixed by Republican Party elites.[25][26][27] Part of Adams' views on the Trump campaign stem from his background in hypnosis. However, Adams officially announced his endorsement of Hillary Clinton in June 2016, stating that Clinton had paired "...the idea of President Trump with nuclear disaster, racism, Hitler, the Holocaust, and whatever else makes you tremble in fear" and that he would be "...a top-ten assassination target" because he "...wrote about his (Donald Trump's) persuasion skills in positive terms". [28]

wiki

My opinion and firm conviction is that Scott's obviously crazy as hell.

Today, the EU in its relationship with America has moved from ostensibly independent to a complete, and rather servile, dependency.

This is largely a reflection of America's new fiercely aggressive stance in international affairs under the guidance of the neo-cons.

I have long been a supporter of the EU as a concept, always in the hope of a more diverse, multi-polar world emerging, but America's abuse of the organization and the organization's complete lack of thoughtful leadership and independence have given me second thought.

But all such organizations affect not just economics but also political life, international relations, culture, and social life, and it is reasonable to become against the concept when the total relationship is destructive of these things even while remaining positive economically.

I believe that is the point we are at.

The EU has been reduced to a one-stop-shopping window for America's warrior diplomats. Recent events with America's dirty killing games in Ukraine and Syria and the EU's blind acceptance of them, despite hurting its own interests, provide a turning point or watershed for me.

Forcing German troops to Russia’s border on the anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, the most violent event in human history, is insane and immoral. Interfering in the free flow of trade between Europe and Russia also makes everyone poorer in economic terms. And there are the terrible migration consequences of America’s savagery throughout the Middle East, sending millions running for their lives.

And now the US is going to cram TTIP down Europe's throat, a treaty which reflects largely American corporate interests, so even economic benefits come into question.

Moreover, there is not a single outstanding leader in today’s Europe to stand up for Europe’s own interests and for principled behavior in international affairs.

It would be better now to dissolve it, and perhaps start all over again in future.

I do not deny the major role the US has played in bringing us to the state we are in today: however,Europe has its own technocrats and bureaucrats doing what technocrats and bureaucrats do, it has its own 1% looking out for the interests of the 1%, and while the US has played a major role in Libya and Syria, the UK and France were the first to push for the war with Libya and they still politic for a hard line in Syria.

....Kaukokaipuu: People of, say, Irish descent who have never actually been to the country of their ancestry may still experience an unexpected ache for it, as if they miss it — a strange, contradictory sort of feeling, as you can't really miss someplace you've never been. But the Finnish recognize that the emotion exists, and they gave it a name: kaukokaipuu, a feeling of homesickness for a place you've never visited. It can also mean a kind of highly specified version of wanderlust, a "craving for a distant land" — dreaming from your desk about some far-off place like New Zealand, or the Hawaiian Islands, or Machu Picchu, with an intensity that feels almost like homesickness.

Malu: You'd like to think you are a person of average conversational and social skills, and yet this all evaporates the moment you find yourself sharing an elevator with the CEO of your company. The Dusun Baguk people of Indonesia know how you feel. Specifically, Smith writes that they would call this feeling malu, "the sudden experience of feeling constricted, inferior and awkward around people of higher status." Instead of this being something to be embarrassed about, however, Smith's research has shown that in this particular culture it's considered an entirely appropriate response; it's even a sign of good manners. Something to remember the next time your mind goes blank when your boss asks you a question: You are only being polite.

Pronoia: At one point in J.D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, Seymour Glass muses about himself, "Oh, God, if I'm anything by a clinical name, I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy." About three decades later, sociologist Fred Goldner came up with a name for this: pronoia, the opposite of paranoia. Instead of the fear that you are at the center of some diabolical lot, pronoia, as Smith describes it, is the "strange, creeping feeling that everyone's out to help you." And, hey, just because you're pronoid doesn't mean they're not out to help you.

Torschlusspanik: Life is passing you by. The deadline's approaching. The train's a-comin'. Literally translated from German, torschlusspanik means "gate-closing panic," a word to summarize that fretful sensation of time running out. It may serve you well, when experiencing this panicky emotion, to hesitate before allowing it to spur you toward impulsivity, and call to mind the German idiom Torschlusspanik ist ein schlechter Ratgeber — that is, "Torschlusspanik is a bad adviser."....

Between 2008 and 2014, 40% of all murder convictions in Florida were criminal aliens. In New York it was 34% and Arizona 17.8%.

During those years, criminal aliens accounted for 38% of all murder convictions in the five states of California, Texas, Arizona, Florida and New York, while illegal aliens constitute only 5.6% of the total population in those states...

In Tom Tancredo's article in Breitbart, he quotes the numbers above and bemoans the fact that you won't see these numbers in the MSM...

Let’s look at a few numbers. You haven’t seen them in the New York Times, Atlanta Constitution, or the Miami Herald, nor have they been featured on NBC Nightly news or CNN. So, the average American is blissfully unaware of them.

Perhaps, it is because the numbers he cites are questionable.

PunditFact was asked to fact-check Tancredo’s numbers. This is what they found…

Several readers asked us to look into Tancredo’s core statement that between 2008 and 2014, "criminal aliens accounted for 38 percent of all murder convictions in the five states of California, Texas, Arizona, Florida and New York."

There are serious glitches in his claim. He botches the takeaway of the presentation, which has plenty of issues on its own.

A botched summary

We tried a variety of ways to reach Tancredo and did not hear back.

In his column, he embedded a video of the presentation by the Center for Security Policy and invited readers to watch the whole thing.

We did. The first thing that jumped out was Tancredo mangled the dates.

He said "criminal aliens" accounted for 38 percent of murder convictions in five states between 2008 and 2014.

In fact, the presentation offered numbers for 2005 to 2008.

That's not the only issue. The presentation’s author, James Simpson, told us he had emailed Breitbart about Tancredo’s use of his presentation. "(Tancredo) quoted the whole thing incorrectly," Simpson told PunditFact.

[In addition]

Our research found that even if Tancredo had quoted the presentation as it was given, there would still be plenty of concern about its accuracy.

Simpson’s report includes findings from two separate sources: an article that describes 2008-14 data from the Texas Department of Public Safety, and his digest of a 2011 Government Accountability Office report, which uses 2005-08 numbers.

We got into the weeds of each source, and the fact is neither provides an accurate look at the percentage of murders committed by criminal aliens in those five states.

The real figure may be impossible to know; Texas appears to be the only one of the five states that actually keeps track of convictions of criminal aliens. The "criminal aliens" label applies to noncitizens who have either legal or illegal immigration status. (It is incorrect to consider all of them as illegal immigrants.)

With various estimates floating around in Tancredo’s article, it’s useful to start with the solid numbers out of Texas.

The Texas Department of Public Safety continuously updates its tally of criminal aliens booked into local jails, tracking the charges filed and whether the person was convicted.

The agency’s latest report covers June 1, 2011, to July 31, 2015. In that time, 344 noncitizens were convicted of homicide. In about the same period, Texas had 4,571 murders. (There’s a difference between calendar and fiscal years, but as of this writing, the differences balance out.) So based on counts of actual cases, criminal aliens account for 7.5 percent of all homicides in Texas.

That figure is striking because it is one-fifth as large as the number Simpson gave in his presentation. Simpson said, "Illegal aliens have committed 35 percent of all murders in Texas since 2008."

Simpson told us he had not seen the official Texas report. He had relied solely on an article for PJ Media.

In our view, official hard data beats something in an article.

Murky federal data

The numbers from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a widely respected source, are also imprecise — which is obvious from all of the report’s cautionary notes.In 2011, the GAO aimed to learn the cost of keeping criminal aliens behind bars. The government analysts wrote that due to the large number of arrest files, they randomly selected 1,000 criminal aliens in five states — Arizona, California, Florida, New York and Texas — and took a close look at their arrest records.

The researchers detailed a host of caveats: At the state level, it’s possible that some people are counted twice if, for example, they are first kept at a county jail and are then transferred to a state prison. And the margin of error for the overall tally of homicides, as well as other crimes, was +/- 20 percent.

The GAO was clear about the lack of precision in its results. A close look shows why anyone should use them with great caution.

Because this was a study of costs, the only state prisoners examined fell under a federal reimbursement program called the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP). Working with broad estimates, the GAO gave the percentage of convicted murders in each state’s population under that program. We used those percentages to come up with the number of criminal alien murderers in each state (see our chart).

Without wading too deep into the weeds, we found that our analysis of the publicly available data wasn’t matching up with Simpson’s. Simpson’s total of murders is about 7,085, and our estimate was much lower at 5,300-5,400. Further, in Florida, he reported three times as many killers as our estimate, and his percentage of all homicides due to criminal immigrants in Texas was about double the official number (albeit for a different time period).

We should note that Simpson’s numbers are the basis for Tancredo’s claim that criminal aliens accounted for 38 percent of all murder convictions in the five states of California, Texas, Arizona, Florida and New York.

When we asked Simpson about his figures, he said after several months of writing to the GAO, he got the actual raw numbers.

But Simpson’s figures must be based on some statistical assumptions, not raw data, because his total is larger than the number of individual cases examined by the GAO. And Simpson told us "the whole thing is difficult to understand frankly, and they couldn’t explain it very well over the phone either. I may have to go back to them for clarification."

Also, Simpson compared the number of immigrants convicted of murder to the total number of murders. Tancredo said the percentages referred to all murder convictions. Since many murders go unsolved, that statement is clearly incorrect. This error underscores another way that Tancredo misquoted Simpson's work.

We do have the number of people arrested for homicide in Texas 2011-2014 (a shorter period than the one for the number of criminal aliens convicted of homicide). Convicted aliens represent 12 percent of all homicide arrests, but it's important to note that due to the mismatched time periods, that figure is too high.

The bottom line is this: Even the man who generated the numbers, which Tancredo then misquoted, expresses uncertainty about their precision.

Our ruling

Tancredo said that between 2008 and 2014, over one-third of the murder convictions in Arizona, California, Florida, New York and Texas were committed by illegal immigrants. The man who presented the data Tancredo cites said Tancredo "quoted the whole thing incorrectly."

Tancredo used the wrong time period. He thought the baseline number was homicide convictions when it was actually all homicides. Most important of all, he took the presentation he relied on at face value and ignored the hard numbers available from the Texas Department of Public Safety.

And while Tancredo might not have known it, the researcher whose work he used himself has questions about the underlying data he used. We have hard data from Texas that refutes the big and estimated numbers Tancredo used. Undocumented immigrants do commit murder, but perhaps only one-fifth as often as Tancredo said.

The government has made it impossible to get all the figures, but people with knowledge of neighborhoods before they became Mexico Norte know damn well what has happened to crime their....I do, it's where I grew up.

Do you really think Victor Davis Hanson is lying about what's happened to where he grew up and the rest of California's Central Valley?

Or that LA's 50 percent hit and run rate is caused by Immigrants from Canada?

In response to Trump's nativist views on immigrants, the WaPO put out an article last year that referenced a number of issues related to the immigrant population and crime. In the article a number of different studies are listed.

We have a perfect right to keep out those we distrust or not like for some reason.

In the past this list has included, but is not limited to, commies, Nazis, Japanese....today it should definitely include moslems....for the obvious reasons, terrorism, Sharia, which does not mix with our way of life....

In the case of Mexicans, there are just way too many of them....we don't even really know the numbers....at some point it becomes unsupportable....I think we are there, and have been....

We are not under an obligation to ruin our own country for the sake of others.

Abandoned farms, Third World living conditions, pervasive public assistance -- welcome to the once-thriving Central Valley.

Victor Davis Hanson

We hear about the tough small-business regulations that have driven residents out of the state, at the rate of 2,000 to 3,000 a week. But from my unscientific observations these past weeks, it seems rather easy to open a small business in California without any oversight at all, or at least what I might call a “counter business.” I counted eleven mobile hot-kitchen trucks that simply park by the side of the road, spread about some plastic chairs, pull down a tarp canopy, and, presto, become mini-restaurants.

There are no “facilities” such as toilets or washrooms. But I do frequently see lard trails on the isolated roads I bike on, where trucks apparently have simply opened their draining tanks and sped on, leaving a slick of cooking fats and oils. Crows and ground squirrels love them; they can be seen from a distance mysteriously occupied in the middle of the road.

"California coastal elites may worry about the oxygen content of water available to a three-inch smelt in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, but they seem to have no interest in the epidemic dumping of trash, furniture, and often toxic substances throughout California’s rural hinterland. Yesterday, for example, I rode my bike by a stopped van just as the occupants tossed seven plastic bags of raw refuse onto the side of the road. I rode up near their bumper and said in my broken Spanish not to throw garbage onto the public road. But there were three of them, and one of me. So I was lucky to be sworn at only. I note in passing that I would not drive into Mexico and, as a guest, dare to pull over and throw seven bags of trash into the environment of my host.

In fact, trash piles are commonplace out here — composed of everything from half-empty paint cans and children’s plastic toys to diapers and moldy food. I have never seen a rural sheriff cite a litterer, or witnessed state EPA workers cleaning up these unauthorized wastelands. So I would suggest to Bay Area scientists that the environment is taking a much harder beating down here in central California than it is in the Delta. Perhaps before we cut off more irrigation water to the west side of the valley, we might invest some green dollars into cleaning up the unsightly and sometimes dangerous garbage that now litters the outskirts of our rural communities."

"n fact, trash piles are commonplace out here — composed of everything from half-empty paint cans and children’s plastic toys to diapers and moldy food. I have never seen a rural sheriff cite a litterer, or witnessed state EPA workers cleaning up these unauthorized wastelands."===Never to be reflected in "Rates of Crime of Mexican Immigrants"

Ramadan in Pennsylvania: Muslim shoots cop 7 times, fires on 2nd cop No doubt the shapers of opinion are already busy at work trying to discover Abdul Wahi’s motive — that is, the non-jihad explanation of the shooting that they can use to try to fool the American people. “Folcroft police officer survives being shot 7 times; suspect identified,” WPVI, June 24, 2016: FOLCROFT, Pa. (WPVI) — […]Read in browser »

"Will is the quintessential Yankee Conservative. Yankee Conservatives are not particularly interested in conserving anything. Their main issue is that the other team is in such a hurry that they often look undignified as they sprint off toward utopia.

The Yankee Conservative places the greatest value on his dignity by putting up a choreographed resistance only to acquiesce to whatever it is the Progressives have in mind."

Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.